Pen to Paper: Do You Swear?

I’m not going to get into all the ins and outs of swearing – how it works in the brain, the reasons for using it, the social implications. All very interesting stuff, but it’s not our purpose here.

I’m going to quickly remind all and sundry that if you’re a writer of children’s books or religious matter, this stuff is radioactive and isn’t for you. Other fiction writers should merely be certain that a cuss word is the mot juste, just like you do with every other word you use.

Ursula K. LeGuin takes a dim view of writers who overuse the good old Anglo-Saxon imperatives, and she’s got a pretty solid point. These are people who take their cue from B.D. in Doonesbury: A fellow soldier B.D. was heading with to the first Gulf War said he had been a civilian so long he no longer knew how to use the f-word; B.D. said, “Easy. You just use it like a comma.” These words can be dynamite if used sparingly and trite if used like commas.

And that reminds me of this oversaturated paragraph from a college textbook:

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